Trinidad and Tobago Drupal Developer

The Trinidad Guardian, one of 3 popular newspapers in Trinidad, re-launched their website on New Years Day 2009 using Drupal. The site has a simplistic design done by their in-house graphics designer Ms. Maxie Navarro. The Drupal developer behind it, Shivan Jaikaran, would like to share his techniques as a tech case study.

The Homepage

The homepage has a different look from every other page on the website. This was done using a custom page-front.tpl.php and Panels. The main sections of the website (the same as their print edition) are the main menus (or the primary links). The colours corresponding to the menus correlate to the print editions as well. The colours (on hover and active) were done using simple CSS.

The Internet Editors needed to decide which articles go exactly where in the centre column of the homepage. For this, Nodequeues were used extensively.

Well it has certainly been a while. My site has been neglected for far too long. It was running Drupal 5.9 (!!) for about a year now. So tonight I finally upgraded to Drupal 6 and installed some new spam fighting techniques and well as gave it a new theme.

The entire process took me about 2 hours. I made sure and took cautionary steps such as backuping up my site in case anything should go wrong.

A "Frappr" (it means â€œfriend mapperâ€) map is like a guest book â€“ it displays a map of the world on which users and listeners of this website can stick a virtual pin with their name and location. It is a way for all of us Trinis (and non-Trinis) to get to know each other just a little bit. There is no registration involved and it is free. You do not even need to use your real name if you do not wish to. Please consider checking out my Frappr map below and entering your name and location. I would love to know where my visitors/listeners are from! Thanks!

One night late at 2am (when my creative juices are flowing like a raging rapid), I decided to customize my own Word Press theme geared towards Trinidadians. The theme has all the colours of the National Flag of Trinidad and Tobago.

One user said it does not work properly in Word Press 1.5. I have not tested it in 1.5 but it works in versions before that. I have not had the time to upgrade it to 1.5 as yet. Sorry.